Motto: "read it. Was it reviewed by any actual economists? Mine was by five, are we all wrong?" ~gavin

It's pretty obvious that the USG has in fact abandoned all hope they may kill Bitcoin by forking it. After the utter assraping it received recently it's not hard to see why, either. We're clearly too powerful to be engaged directly, and if we're too powerful to be engaged directly on the USG speciality field, which is finance, then we're definitely too powerful to be engaged directly on our specialty field, which is ops.i

The disadvantage to being an asset, however, is that you can't simply give up and move on, like sovereign people can. A twelve year old Cartman can at any point go "screw you guys, I'm going home". A forty-eight year old Gavin Bellii is stuck doing the song and the dance, whether it suits him or not, whether it's flattering or humiliating, whether it even accrues any notable benefit for the handler or not much worth the mention at all. This is the true sadness of being a thing rather than a person, and an excellent teaching aid for the youthful minds that are unclear how the world works. Don't be like USGavin, kids. It sucks. It's worse than being on drugs, at least drugs you can quit any time. Plus they're fun. Being an asset however is neither fun nor does it ever end, really the only point of similarity is that you don't think much of either at first, then next thing you know, you're in way over your head.

Anyway, it's clear they've given up on the direct, but they've all these assets which have to be used, so they're being used for meta purposes. In other circumstances I might have let it slide, but today I don't feel like it. So here we go, let's hurt some butts.

A. Meta-purpose #1. The idea is that if you discuss a hard fork as a possibility, it will then become a possibility.

That's not how this world works, however. The fact of the matter is that nobody currently has, and nobody will ever have the authority to fork Bitcoin. Ever. Satoshi used to have it, and he did use it. Satoshi left.iii Gavin never had it, but in spite of not ever having it nevertheless used it once, by allowing USMike to merge breaking code into Bitcoin which resulted in a hardfork. The idea was to probe the network strength, at the time, the results came out scary, at the time. This was long long ago, it's a lot scarier today.

So no, forking Bitcoin is not on the table. If they put it in the fucking pledge of allegiance, and every US employee and every child of school age recites it faithfully three times a day, "We belive in Social Justice and the incontrovertible right of unelected bureaucrats to fork Bitcoin", it still won't be a thing.

Nobody has the authority to fork Bitcoin. Not now. Not ever. No matter what happens. Get used to it.

A. Meta-purpose #2. The idea is that if you act as if "experts" from outside Bitcoin are really experts, then they will really be experts, and their word will count for something.

It does not work that way. Bitcoin was not created "by economists", Bitcoin was created AGAINST "economist" consensus, and it was declared unworkable by those same self-proclaimed pseudo-experts, and then it worked AGAINST their alleged "knowledge" and "understanding", which neither exist to any degree. And now here they are, wanting to be taken as people ? Ahahahahahahahahaha

No but seriously, allow me to laugh a while.

Here's a hint : the products of the US paper mill, be they "Nobel prize" recipients like Obama and that nitwit Krugman or simple "global warming consensus"-level grant eaters have nothing of any value or import to say about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the living proof that they are intellectualy bankrupt, morally worthless and that their knowledge is better approximated by zero than by epsilon. So no, having a piece of paper signed by the USG does not translate into any Bitcoin value. It does not work for fiat money, it does not work for fiat expertise, it does not work for fiat anything.

Because this is what Bitcoin is : the great flame to consume all that worthless paper. But all of it, you hear ? And this isn't negotiable either, all of it, no exceptions. It's not like we're going to kill direct monetary inflation but you can turn around and create block inflation and then hack your shit right back into the core of the world. It's not like we're going to kill paper money but then you can turn around and get your paper degrees recognised. You can't. You want to say something about bitcoin, six months reading the logs and then get in the WoT. If you do not, you do not exist. And no pile of paperwork from our enemies is going to make you exist.

A. Meta-purpose #3. The idea is that if you continue to pretend like the poor have anything to say about money, then the poor will continue to have something to say about money.

Government sponsored enterprises enter the business, in due course bad behavior is made mandatory, and the evil financial network is bigger than the honest financial network, with the result that even though everyone knows what is happening, people continue to use the paper issued by the evil financial network, because of network effects - the big, main issuers, are the issuers you use if you want to do business.

Then knowledgeable people complain that the evil financial network is heading for disaster, that the government sponsored enterprises are about to cause a “collapse of the total financial system”, as Wallison and Alan Greenspan complained in 2005, the government debates shrinking the evil government sponsored enterprises, as with “S. 190 [109th]: Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005″ but they find easy money too seductive, and S. 190 goes down in flames before a horde of political activists chanting that easy money is sound, and opposing it is racist, nazi, ignorant, and generally hateful, the recent S. 190 debate on limiting portfolios (bond issue supporting dud mortgages) by government sponsored enterprises being a perfect reprise of the debates on limiting the issue of new assignats in the 1790s.

The big and easy government attacks on money target a single central money issuer, as with the first of the modern political attacks, the French Assignat of 1792, but in the late nineteenth century political attacks on financial networks began, as for example the Federal reserve act of 1913, the goal always being to wind up the network into a single too big to fail entity, and they have been getting progressively bigger, more serious, and more disastrous, as with the most recent one. Each attack is hugely successful, and after the cataclysm that the attack causes the attackers are hailed as saviors of the poor, the oppressed, and the nation generally, and the blame for the the bad consequences is dumped elsewhere, usually on Jews, greedy bankers, speculators, etc, because such attacks are difficult for ordinary people understand. I have trouble understanding your proposal - ordinary users will be easily bamboozled by a government sponsored security update. Further, when the crisis hits, to disagree with the line, to doubt that the regulators are right, and the problem is the evil speculators, becomes political suicide, as it did in America in 2007, sometimes physical suicide, as in Weimar Germany.

Still, it is better, and more resistant to attack by government sponsored enterprises, than anything I have seen so far.

To make it perfectly clear : irrespective of how much time and effort USG assets spend grooming Reddit and generally the crowds of self-entitled poor for support, the poor have no speaking part in Bitcoin. This is what we're doing here: reducing the franchise, reducing social benefits, reducing the welfare state. To ruin, all of them.

The future of the poor is to either die (of plain hunger) or else to start sucking up to us. Not to them, the USG isn't going to save you nor anyone else. Because it can't. Because you have no money, no skills, no abilities, no value and no future. And since you don't, neither does it. So no, a large assembly of nobodies, no matter how large, is NOT going to have any political value. Not some, not a little. N.O.N.E.

You either become our slaves or get crushed with your current socialist governments. These are the choices, there's not a third, there's not that imaginary alternative where somehow the current taxation and redistribution models continue. That boat sailed, it was fun for as long as it lasted but the joyride's over.

Pro tip : find good masters early on, while the rest of the slaves are too fucking drunk to have figured it out, because if you wait for too long it may be that the people you'd want to serve won't be taking any more slaves and you'll be stuck with Bubba the gladiator school owner. It has happened before.

That is all.

———

Yes, it is. This is why I leak on them, not the other way around. That's why their heart bleeds, not mine. Etc. [↩]

Nice going for all the backup "the man that really built Bitcoin" and whatnot crapolade. Yeah, I know you desperately need it boys. It won't stick. [↩]

To a large degree because he got sick of just how fucking stupid Gavin is, a point which Gavin publicly confessed to a few years back, but meanwhile it's "not known" anymore, because reddit can't read. [↩]

The problem is that the distributed consensus mechanism of Bitcoin causes shared ownership of a common pool of storage space. The problem is actually an age old one; The Tragedy of the Commons. Every node only bears a small portion of the resource cost of the network and therefore nodes sell "transactions" several orders of magnitude less than it costs the network as a whole.
Removing the block limit entirely would necessarily drive out uncompetitive nodes, in this way damaging the decentralization of the network, while driving down transaction costs.
Boiling it down... How does one algorithmically divvy up sovereign ownership of the storage space of a distributed cryptocurrency?

It's good that you've heard of the tragedy of commons. It doesn't seem you actually understand all that much about how Bitcoin works. In any case your idea of "a problem" on these lines is entirely of you, has nothing to do with the actual thing you aim to discuss.

A "node" as you use it doesn't exist. A miner does exist, and since only ONE miner can mine any one block, then by definition there are no commons involved. Whoever mines a block is the god-king-emperor and in any sense sovereign owner of that block, able and entitled to include or not include whatever he feels like including or not including. For instance, for a long time a miner included no transactions at all. This was perfectly valid behaviour, and it had no ill effects, contrary to idle speculation at that time.

This is a fine hook to allow us to discuss sovereignity, of the personal (ie, only) kind, which is what Bitcoin is created to both support and demonstrate. As a subplot : for this reason it is not upon anyone to judge, from an imaginary, self-awarded perch of superiority, how Bitcoin works. I don't care how you figure you've gained this license, you do not in fact have it. Not you, nor Gavin, nor anyone is "a bitcoin scientist", especially not in the pseudo-scientific sense that term has achieved in socialist English, between "earth sciences" and Irigaray-"sciences".

A node may, and in common parlance also does, denote a transaction relayer, which is how we know you don't know what you're talking about. You're using words you've heard used, but the idea you've formed of their meaning is askew of actual use, likely through a process reminescent of the intellectual ruin of the English speaking world. While it is true that relayers are in a nebulous relationship with the nebulous pool of signed-but-not-yet included transactions (whether they be valid or not), it is not true that this is in any way relevant for our discussion. For one thing, every miner is by definition a relayer, too, and so if the entire rest of non-mining relayers goes to hell the process would still function.

In fact, because of numerous attacks on the Bitcoin protocol by the US sponsored troop of shitgoblins currently misrepresenting themselves as "in charge" for the benefit of the clueless redditard, empowered by grevious oversight on the part of the original author of this Bitcoin thing (who, specifically, is NOT the later group of bums), the only people actually relaying reliably are the miners anyway, in the sense that as voluntary relayers are vanishing under the cost of storing and processing GBs worth of data, miners (and some other parties that have a vested interest in transactions still being relayed) pick up the slack.

Hello, sorry for the slow response, and I appreciate you taking the time. I agree that Bitcoin will survive regardless of how the block size is handled, but are you at all concerned with centralization, the atrophy of hash-power, or the necessary reduction in transaction volume in order to support the hashing and decentralized storage?
I am on the fence on this issue. On the one hand I don't particular care about "decentralization", I'm more concerned about "freedom of entry". I don't really care that the network will be less hobbled by noncompetitive nodes. On the flip side, it's important to avoid attacks on centralized nodes either via hashpower or the prolific ability for the State to fuck up such things.
In other words, you're absolutely correct that there is no commons issue as long as you are not concerned about centralization, but is that your position?

are you at all concerned with centralization, the atrophy of hash-power, or the necessary reduction in transaction volume in order to support the hashing and decentralized storage?

Yes, which is exactly why I deny Gavin's idiocy. Because if left unchecked it leads directly to those.

On the one hand I don’t particular care about “decentralization”, I’m more concerned about “freedom of entry”

Freedom of entry is a complex matter. Maybe look into how it's handled on #bitcoin-assets, I'm pretty certain that's going to be the blueprint for Bitcoin and the future generally.

I don’t really care that the network will be less hobbled by noncompetitive nodes

The network is so designed that it can never, ever, under any circumstance be hobbled by nodes. If you think about it you might realise why.

On the flip side, it’s important to avoid attacks on centralized nodes either via hashpower or the prolific ability for the State to fuck up such things.

Enough with the word salad. "Centralised nodes" ARE the state. By definition. And they don't exist, and won't exist for as long as I remain more powerful than Gavin, or in proper terms, for as long as reality trumps ignorant blather.